The acclaimed Jasper Jones author on raising three young daughters, identities forged in country life, and how literature can combat toxic masculinity
It's a blustery morning at Fremantle's Booyembara Park. Rain hammers down in sideways sheets, and the horizon is a blurred smudge of green and grey. Hardly ideal conditions to interview author Craig Silvey; we can barely hear each other over the downpour.
"Lovely day for a walk!" Silvey shouts from beneath his polka-dot umbrella. He points to his sodden shoes with a grin. "I'm squelching. Should've worn some gumboots ... we're like Shackleton out here," he laughs.
On sunnier days at "Boo Park", as Silvey calls it, the 43-year-old and his partner, Clare Testoni, stroll the lake with their four-month-old twins, Hazel and Stella, while their three-year-old daughter, Matilda, hoons around on her push-bike.
"We have a rapidly expanded family," Silvey says, sheltering beneath a corridor of paperbarks. "It's extraordinary. Our hearts are full. I'm a very devoted and besotted father."
More than 15 years after the publication of Jasper Jones, the modern Australian classic which won readers around the world, Silvey seems happily anchored in a gentler chapter of life. He's weeks away from launching Runt and the Diabolical Dognapping, the sequel to his bestselling children's novel and feature film Runt.
Today, between wisecracks about the weather, Silvey is grounded and reflective, speaking in measured bursts and pausing often to weigh each thought.
"I've had plenty of requests for sequels [to other novels]. But Runt was a beguiling proposition," he says of the second book, which follows the much-loved Annie Shearer and her scruffy dog after they compete at the Krumpets Dog Show in London. "I mean, how often do you get the opportunity to give thousands of families something to look forward to?"
As the rain intensifies, we duck across the road to Tinsmith cafe. As if on cue, Testoni arrives with the twins, all rosy cheeks and button noses as they sleep in their stroller. "Hey, you stole my umbrella!" she teases Silvey, peeling off her raincoat and settling in for a coffee with a friend. An award-winning writer and performer in her own right, they make a formidable couple.
We perch on high stools at a long communal table. Cradling a long black, Silvey tells me he's well into developing the second Runt film. "Part of what accelerated the sequel was the knowledge that our young cast isn't getting any younger," he says. "Film is mercurial; you never know what's going to disrupt it, but I feel really confident."
Seconds later, a cry erupts from across the cafe. Silvey stops mid-sentence to listen. "That's Stella," he says with a smile that is half amusement, half instinct. "It really changes your brain chemistry, being a parent. I'm attuned to the smallest sounds and what they mean."
Our conversation drifts to his beginnings. Silvey grew up on his parents' apple orchard outside Dwellingup, a rural town south of Perth. Living in a former machinery shed, he and his brother Bret often spent long days helping out with the trees and harvest. "Growing up in a timber and orchard town, men tended to exhibit a quiet, consistent and enduring work ethic that was imprinted on me from an early age," he says. "It's lent itself well to the art of crafting novels. I am stubbornly determined, dedicated and patient in my approach to storytelling."
The women around him left just as deep a mark. "My gran, Joy, and her sister, my Great Aunty Doll, lived in the same regional coal town, and both were busy, civic-minded, sensible, clever, athletic and hard-working," he says. The character of Dolly Shearer, Annie's formidable grandmother in Runt, is an amalgam of the women who helped to raise him.
In their teens, the brothers endured a three-hour daily bus trip to a private school in Mandurah, long rides that left Silvey adrift between the orchard and the city, lost in books and imagination. When Silvey turned 17 and got his licence, he moved to Fremantle "as soon as humanly possible", drawn to its bohemian energy and the sense, as he puts it, that "I'd finally found a place I belonged". And he has been there ever since.
The port city quickly became his creative refuge. In his 20s he fronted a raucous local band called the Nancy Sykes. "We were and remained completely amateur," he laughs, remembering nights spent "writing songs and singing them with the aid of a very small, very loud Les Paul-shaped electric ukulele."
Fremantle was also where, at just 19, he began writing Rhubarb, his debut novel set amid the same streets he'd come to love. He skipped university and worked a string of menial jobs to fund the manuscript; publishing Rhubarb at 21 earned him a reputation as a writer to watch. "It's a sensorial journey through Fremantle, following a vision-impaired heroine who is very connected to her place and kind of mired within it," she says.
Like many of Silvey's creations,Rhubarb's Eleanor is an outsider: quiet, idiosyncratic, feeling her way through the world. She set the pattern for the tender, nuanced portraits of adolescence that followed—from the small-town misfits of Jasper Jones to the searching protagonist of Honeybee, each drawn with a warmth that makes them feel lived-in and true.
I ask about the way young men are often pathologised in the media today, cast as either troubled or threatening, while algorithms push ever darker messages their way. And while he says he's not well versed in TikTok or incel culture, he's clear about the need for better examples.
"It seems to me that there's no avenue that's capably competing," he says. "It's important that we have reliable, modern, admirable role models for boys to connect to ... fathers or men who are connected to families, whether it's coaches or people in leadership—all that stuff's really important."
For Silvey, novels can provide that example. "The men I felt spiritually connected to I found in fiction," he says. "From Atticus Finch to Lester Lamb, my masculine archetypes were fair-minded, even-handed, considerate, intelligent, strong and sensitive."
That belief runs through Runt, particularly in the way he writes Annie Shearer's brother Max and father Brian. "It's vital that men and boys have positive and well-reinforced messages in literature," he continues. "And what that requires is literature that speaks to them, that respects them, that honours them and the journey that they're on.
"Boys aren't that fundamentally different," he adds. "I think boys ultimately want to feel safe. They want to feel as though their experiences and their inner world are validated and important."
Outside, the rain is finally clearing, although Silvey quips, "I don't know about you but my toes are numb." Luckily, home is only five minutes away so he can change his wet shoes before getting on with his day of baby wrangling and fine-tuning the promotional tour for his new book. Once the twins are older, he'll return to the writing desk (there's one, possibly two novels in the works), but for now, fatherhood is his central plotline.
"I've been shifting and calibrating my definitions of what family is," he says. "I suspect a lot of my aspirations and philosophies of parenting have been imprinted on the Shearer family, particularly Brian. He's present, loving, fallible and fair-minded.
"That's the kind of dad that I try to be."